Adam Levin - The Instructions

“Why you all pissy?”

Pissy? I said.

“You face all pissy. Don’t bring the pissy here.”

Don’t bring the pissy.

“You like that one.”

I did. It was funny. I was no longer pissy. Don’t bring the pissy’d knocked the pissy right out of me. Fun words to say. I said them once more, and wanted to again, but then I got afraid that I’d wear them out, so I tentatively offered up another one to Flowers: Quit hauling that pissy?

“Not so much,” Flowers said.

Keep the pissy in the commode?

“I don’t even—”

Don’t drive Miss Pissy?

“That’s actually alright, but don’t put I said that in you scripture. People take the joke wrong cause you’re lousy at funny, and by the time you get done with it, I’m the angry black man, no sense of irony, hates all the white people and Morgan Freeman til one day a whiteboy melts his hard heart. I do not hate white people, or Morgan Freeman, nor are you white. But you’re gonna put it in, I can tell the way you’re grinning. So fine. You put any of this in, though, you put all of it in. Right?”

Right, I said.

“And I’m no kind of fucken Queequeg, either. I’m a lawyer wrote three novels, old friend of your dad’s — a white man, Judah, I hasten to add.”

I said alright, I said.

“This doubly important because soon I’m gonna talk about a rap song.”

Really? I said. You listen to rap now?

“ You listen to rap, and you put this one on that mix you made me.”

The mix was actually a mix that Vincie’d made me. I liked it so I burned it for Flowers.

‘Zealots’? I said.

“Yeah, that’s the one,” said Flowers. He was folding up his blanket. The earwig flexed its pincers and flew back to the hoodoo shrub. “So what’s your favorite rhyme? Take a minute to decide.” He opened the door and his deformed cat, Edison, bounded out to the lawn in the center of the drop-off circle. Edison’s front legs were half the length of his back ones and he looked jacked-up like a hotrod. Whenever he leapt too high or ran too fast, he’d fall on his throat.

I followed Flowers inside, saying, My favorite’s when Pras goes, ‘And for you bitin’ zealots, your rap styles are relics. No matter who you damage, you’re still a false prophet.’

“Yeah,” said Flowers. “See, that’s the wrong one.”

It’s my favorite, though, I said.

“Well it shouldn’t — something ain’t right. Click click click.” Flowers set the blanket under the altar in the corner. “I left 37 outside,” he said.

37 was Flowers’s cane. When I went out to get it, I saw this squirrel hiding behind an oak in the drop-off circle. The squirrel was hiding from Edison, who was chewing the end of a fallen branch. The cane was in the grass by the hoodoo shrub. It came up to my elbows and weighed eleven pounds. Its shaft was cut from a petrified redwood, and the silvery knob screwed into the top of it was a chromed ball of lead, about twenty times the size of the one at the end of the sap of Maholtz. The cane was functional, but not because Flowers had a limp — he didn’t. The Frontier Motel was thirty miles from Chicago, which meant it wasn’t close to anything good, unless your family was good and they lived in Deerbrook Park or Glenfield, and even then, since Deerbrook Park and Glenfield families mostly lived in houses, there was usually enough room for relatives to stay over. Especially with all the finished basements. Flowers lamented the basements and so had his brother Aaron, who’d had a fatal heart-attack a few years earlier, and left Flowers the Frontier. Aaron had had the cane made and he’d itemized it in the will as item 37, right below the motel, which was item 36, which is why Flowers sometimes called the Frontier 36 and the cane 37 . He loved his brother and it reminded him. The cane was functional because guests at the Frontier often weren’t. A week before, I’d seen Flowers kick one out. There was a poisony smell coming from Room 12, which was right next to the Welcome Office, and Flowers told me to stay in the office while he took care of it, but I came out front and stood in Room 12’s doorway to watch, which was easy, because the Room 12 bathroom was opposite the doorway, and all the action was happening in the bathroom. This guy was making drugs in Room 12’s tub, and when Flowers came in, the guy spun around with eyes like tomatoes and he cursed Flowers and Flowers cursed back and told him he was ruining the bathtub and told him he had to leave. Then the guy stopped cursing and said to give him a couple hours and Flowers told him to leave again, and the guy went for this arm-length lucite rod that he’d been using to stir the mixture in the bathtub, and as soon as he got ahold of it, Flowers plugged the ball-end of his cane in between the guy’s shoulder and chest, right in the rotator cuff, which made the guy’s hand drop the rod and stumble backwards. Flowers followed through, using 37 to pin the guy against the wall, and told him, again, to leave. Then the guy swung at Flowers’s head with the hand of his free arm, and Flowers dodged it Tyson-style — not ducking or blocking, just tilting his head out of the path of the punch, the skin of the guy’s knuckles grazing the point of the ivory horn Flowers wore in his earlobe — and then Flowers lifted the cane and brought it down on top of the guy’s shoulder, which became like gravel. I heard the shattering. The guy dropped to the tiles, screamed, and passed out. A lightning bug landed on my neck and Flowers spun around and told me to call the cops while he kept an eye on the guy. I didn’t want to call the cops, because it was a kind of ratting, but then I didn’t want the guy to come back at night and hurt Flowers in his sleep, so I called them. That was the first time I’d ever seen grown men fight who weren’t on a screen. I didn’t like it so much. It seemed like it shouldn’t have been happening. As stealth as Flowers was with the cane and his Tyson-style, the thing on the whole was very clumsy and ugly, especially the part when they were cursing each other and then when the guy swung his lame punch and the way he began to shudder, broken-shouldered and unconscious, while Flowers stood watch on him. I kept thinking that they were too big to be fighting each other — not too old, really, but too big. While they were fighting each other, they didn’t look like people, or even animals. They looked like giant marionettes constructed from meat who the puppeteer was frustrated with. My mom cooked steak for dinner that night and I made myself eat it because I always ate my steak and I knew that if I didn’t eat it my parents would be worried that I was psychologically harmed from seeing the fight, and then they would decide I shouldn’t go to the Frontier anymore after school which they were already considering since Flowers told my dad about the fight over the phone that evening. If I couldn’t go to the Frontier, then there’d have to be other arrangements made for where I’d get picked up and dropped off by the schoolbus, and that would be an extra hassle on top of all the hassle I’d already caused by getting kicked out of everywhere, and plus I really liked Flowers. So I ate all my steak and then I went to the bathroom and threw up quietly.

The squirrel behind the oak saw his moment and shot across the drop-off circle, startling Edison, who ran up the sidewalk til he fell on his throat, then made a hurt-cat noise and followed me back inside.

Flowers waited on the couch, seeking through “Zealots” with a remote. A chapter (#43, p. 199–205) of what I thought would be this scripture, The Instructions (though back then I was calling it The Autobiography of Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee or Another Guide for the Perplexed or Israelite Scholarship among Gentile Friends in a School Run by Romans —I kept changing my mind), was leaned on a music-stand next to the ottoman. The margins on the front page were totally empty, and there weren’t any red marks anywhere. I wondered if Flowers thought the page was perfect, but I knew it was more likely that he just hadn’t read it yet.